"I write for the poets / Who aren't poets." It begins with this pledge, as Chris McNally launches us into a world of 50 poems as varied and turbulent as the Union itself. From a ditty about treason, "Never Lie to a Sleeping Dog" to love by candlelight in "The Sweetness of Life," from jazz in "Wondering if Coltrane Will Steal My Muse," to free market commerce in "The Giant Spring", McNally embraces this "Wounded cornered wild animal of a country / A lot of us would throw ourselves in front of a bus for."

Chris McNally was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1960. While pursuing his undergraduate degree in history at Cal Berkeley, he also studied at the Université du Benin in Togo, West Africa and in Bordeaux, France. During this period, he worked for a season on a salmon boat in the waters off Southeast Alaska, thus rounding out his education. He later earned a Masters in Fine Arts from New York University and went on to work professionally with Joe Papp, Peter Brook (in New York, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tbilisi, Georgia and Tokyo), Daniel Sullivan, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar. An avid historian, in 2012 he completed the long form essay Principles for a Profound Leadership: The Self-Worth of a Nation about the cumulative influence of Malcom X, Martin Luther King, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and in 2016 he published Fragments of an America, Volume I, all while helping raise two sons and running a thriving construction project management firm for fine homes. He lives outside Hudson, New York with his wife Tamara.

"Chris McNally's Fragments of America, Volume II travels from mythos to the twenty-first century in a voice that whispers, shouts, grieves, loves, and rages. A keen attentiveness to the natural world lightly holds McNally's range from classical forms to ekphrastic conversations with contemporary images. These poems offers a world where:The fireflies arrive like clockworkinside the eternityof this little shack" — Rebecca Chace, author of Talking to the Wolf

"But this is not to say - despite the Whitmanesque zeal - that Chris McNally can be pigeonholed as some sort of one-note patriotic writer. True, he writes with an urgency about what he calls 'this wounded / Cornered wild animal / Of a country,' but like a balladeer of old, he writes about love and folklore as well as historical events, and McNally's voice is truly that of a balladeer, a minstrel, a singer. More, more, more!" — Charles Rammelkamp, London Grip Poetry Review

"With titles ranging from 'Liz Cheney's Horse' and 'A Reexamination of Exodus 7:3 in the Trumpist Fever' to the tender, philosophical 'Love Like This' and 'Alcazar,' Fragments of an America Volume II is a playful but serious, honest, jagged, and necessary work for our era of civil fracture, seeking the 'golden sun of honest wisdom' in the acrid heat of our time. A must read in the current situation we find ourselves in." — Sylvie Bertrand, Co-founding Editor at Cagibi

"Fragments of an America Volume II reminded me of Johnny Cash's music—how the 'Man in Black' fought for the downtrodden. McNally likewise occupies a similar space as a literary outlaw with a populist stance. His poems shine with clear portraits of those struggling physically, emotionally, and spiritually. There's a fair bit of righteous anger for those 'running the machine,' or the politics that suppress the ethics of honest living. Spoken with a voice both tough and tender, the collection has an edge to its heart." — Kathleen Bednarek, Compulsive Reader